A drunk can be very, very unpredictable. Even in low threat areas like this secure area of a hospital, attacks like this happen and you need to have your Active Self Protection ready to protect yourself in the moment. Even as CCW holders, the lessons in this one hit home.

This video is sponsored by CCWSafe, who I use to help me win the fight after the fight: https://get-asp.com/ccwsafe. I am a member and I recommend them highly; please go check them out and thank them for being a sponsor of our daily lessons!

Empty-handed skills are absolutely critical for self-defenders to protect themselves from realistic attacks. First of all, more conflicts you will encounter as a self-defender will require empty-handed skills than will require firearms skills, simply because more self-defense encounters are physical than deadly. Second, since a firearm is a tool of last resort, self-defenders need to have non-lethal options that include empty-handed skills to protect themselves from likely incidents. Third, in the moment of the encounter you may not have the time to get to your gun before you can fight your way to it. Attacks like this show how true it is that even in a deadly force encounter (and someone trying to take your gun is a deadly force encounter) you may likely need empty-handed skills to “earn” your draw before you can get your gun in the fight.

To defend against these kinds of attacks, you need emotional fitness. Emotional fitness is defined as the ability to internally represent a situation or predicament to yourself in such a way as to make you strong and able to successfully defend yourself against it. Repeated practice and thousands of reps of sparring and self-defense absolutely build your emotional fitness to be able to handle whatever comes your way.

You—and ONLY you—can protect yourself from danger when it comes upon you. This officer had his radio on him, called for help, yelled for help, and yet no one could help him until the fight was already over. You are the primary agent in your own rescue, so don’t think for a minute that you can count on someone coming to your aid when attacks happen.

Attacks are physically demanding. Sure, a pure gunfight might last 10 seconds and not place a huge burden on you physically, but the vast majority of encounters we see here at ASP involve physical self-defense as well. Getting into a honest-to-goodness fight with someone is incredibly physically demanding, so being physically fit is an important part of maximizing your chances to protect yourself. Fit people are harder to beat and harder to kill!

In any territorial or predatorial violence, the attacker gets to set the time and circumstances of the attack. They will almost always launch that attack from ambush, or as we like to call it in Umas, from “obscurity.” Surviving that ambush is one of the most important keys to successfully defending yourself.

While we know that shooting with both hands on the gun is best for recoil control and putting fast, accurate shots on target, we also know that it’s not always possible to do. We must train and prepare to use our firearm with both our gun hand and our guard hand in case of injury or incapacitation or some other reason that we can only have one hand on the gun.

The human body is designed to take a ridiculous amount of punishment and still function. You can shoot someone multiple times and they can still pose a deadly threat! Even mortally wounded people can continue to pose a threat for several seconds to even minutes after being shot, so don’t think for a moment that shooting someone will necessarily immediately incapacitate them. That is Hollywood myth.

Attitude. Skills. Plan.

(music in the intro and outro courtesy of Bensound at http://www.bensound.com)